When, back in 2012, our colleague Leonie Wagener conducted a survey on preparatory terminology work in conference interpreting, 93 % of the respondents answered that they never used Google Docs for terminology management in the booth. Today, it seems, team preparation in the cloud by way of a shared mega-glossary is about to become state of the art.

The benefits are quite clear: It saves time – your colleagues may know things you don’t know and the other way around, and with everyone feeding in their knowledge and filling in the missing bits, it’s just much less effort. Everything is double (triple …) checked and mistakes can be spotted more easily. The whole team has a common knowledge base, all interpreters speak the same language and everyone is aware of any open questions waiting to be sorted out (also see Leonie’s AIIC blog article).

Furthermore, you have these highly technical conferences crammed with presentations where the only way to get through preparation is by assigning to each interpreter his or her share of speeches. By working in a common glossary, you can still make sure that everyone gets at least a glimpse of what the other speeches are about so as to be able to jump in if need be.

Apart from that, it is good fun to see your glossary grow as if by magic and to „meet in the glossary“, seeing your colleagues jump about from one cell to the other. And then of course, there is nothing better than discussing things in order to really understand them and process them deeply, which is exactly what you end up doing when working in a common file, using the chat function or simply a comment field.

However, some colleagues still have their doubts when it comes to putting all their effort into these mega glossaries in the cloud, understandably so to a certain extent. Sometimes it is just a matter of taste or habit, but as to the more specific questions or doubts I have heard people mention so far, I have tried to summarise them below and provide possible solutions:

Is it safe to store my customers‘ confidential data in the cloud or with Google?

First of all, storing files in Google Docs (provided you don’t store them publicly, but with restricted access) is as safe as sending them around by e-mail – apart from the fact that Google can read your data. We know that some customers even refuse to send their files to a gmail address, so in any case it is good to double-check with them. Also, it is a good idea not to name your files „XY Corp. – Presentation of the new glass cleaning patent on August 1st, 2015“, but rather make it „cleaning“ or „glass“. Another possible solution might be the use of special encryption software like https://www.boxcryptor.com.

You get lost so easily in these huge glossaries, I just can’t find my way around there. I prefer to see what I need at one glance.

Just like in any (terminology) data base, the more „tags“ (labels) each entry has, the more useful becomes the data base. If, on your three-day, six-language conference, there are several teams working in parallel with many speakers or subjects in each session, then it may be useful to use special columns to indicate the day/speaker/session/subject, or a combination thereof (like „Monday – Miller, Tuesday – Matt“). Technically, the effort is not worth mentioning: Once you have typed this kind of category in one cell, simply drag & copy it to all the cells below in the same column. This way, you can „reserve“ the next couple of lines for your entries and the colleagues use those further below. The smart use of categories and filters is not too complicated and helps everyone to create their own customised view of the big master glossary – here’s a 2 minute VIDEO to illustrate it.

Each of us has their own important terms-to-remember. My colleague writes things into her glossary I would never dream of noting down, and I am sure that she would laugh at the ridiculous things I put into mine, just for the sake of feeling safer.

It may turn out useful to have an individual „private“ column for each user where they are free to mark any terms that are relevant to them (or open questions etc.) to enable everyone in the team to filter their customised shortlists and even print them. The one thing to really laugh about is to see how much the glossaries of different colleagues for the same conference can look alike.

What with all this hiding, sorting and filtering, my colleagues will freak out if, while they are just busy entering terms, I start hiding their language columns, applying filters or changing the sorting order right under their noses.

When there are really many people working on the glossary at the same time, it may be useful, in order to avoid confusing other users when sorting or filtering, to temporarily copy the data from the „master“ sheet to a separate one. You might also wish to enter new terms for one speech in your private sheet first (e.g. hiding the language columns you don’t want to see) and then copy this batch to the big master glossary in one go. Just always make sure you have identical table structures so that you can copy your terminological entries (lines) back and forth from your personal sheet into the master glossary, which is the one where you keep all the data up to date.

There are also a great many add-ons that allow you to work with complex team glossaries more comfortably. With EZ Query, for example, you create a new sheet that, just like a query in MS-Access, shows a pre-defined selection of the data contained in the big master table. You can include just the columns you are interested in (e.g. hiding language or other columns irrelevant to you) and even filter for certain criteria, like only those entries you have marked as important. As soon as someone changes something in the master table, you will see it in your customised table in real time.

All in all, much more chances than risks to keep up with ever more specific conference subjects and short-notice preparation. I would be really interested to know more about the common practice of other colleagues – feel free to post a comment!

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About the author
Anja Rütten is a freelance conference interpreter for German (A), Spanish (B), English (C) and French (C) based in Düsseldorf, Germany. She has specialised in knowledge management since the mid-1990s.